Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  Sometimes he would look out to the gray gables and to the passersby or let his eyes rest on the centennial plaque hanging on the wall, the one with the portrait of his father, and he would think about his family’s history and tell himself that this was how it all ended, that what was happening now was the final chapter. Yes, the final chapter—he was being held up to ridicule, and, to crown it all, his name and his family’s private life were the subject of gossip and scorn. And yet the thought almost made him feel better, because it seemed simple, plausible, and sane, something thinkable, sayable, in comparison with his brooding over this ignominious riddle, this mysterious scandal overhead.

  He could bear it no longer; he shoved his armchair back, left the office, and climbed the stairs. But where should he go now? To the salon, to greet Herr von Throta, nonchalantly and somewhat superciliously, to invite him to join them for dinner, and, as so often before, to be refused? That was what he found truly unbearable, the way the lieutenant avoided him completely, refusing almost every official invitation and preferring instead the easy and private company of his wife.

  Should he wait? In the smoking room maybe? Wait until Herr Throta left and then go to Gerda and speak his mind, have it out with her? But you did not have anything out with Gerda or speak your mind to her. And what about, really? His union with her was based on mutual understanding, consideration, and silence. He did not need to make himself ridiculous in her eyes as well. By playing the jealous husband, he would be proclaiming the scandal, putting it into words—admitting that those people out there were right. Did he feel jealous? Of whom? Of what? Oh, jealousy was wide of the mark. Such a strong emotion meant that you could produce evidence—mistaken, perhaps foolish evidence, but at least something real, something liberating. Oh no, all he felt was a little fear, a little tormenting and nagging fear of the whole affair.

  He went upstairs to his dressing room to wipe his brow with eau de cologne and then returned to the second floor, determined to break the silence in the salon at any price. But the moment he took hold of the white door’s burnt-gold handle, a storm of music surged up again and he shrank back.

  He descended the servants’ stairs to the ground floor, crossed the entrance hall and the cold vestibule, and stepped out into the garden; he went back to the entrance hall with its stuffed bear and stood fidgeting on the main staircase landing with its basin of goldfish—but he could find no rest anywhere, just stood there listening, lurking in the shadows, full of shame and sadness, crushed and driven by his fear of both the secret and the public scandal.

  One day, in much the same mood, he stood leaning over the third-floor gallery, peering down into the bright, open stairwell, where everything was silent, and little Johann came out of his room, down the steps of his “balcony,” and along the corridor, on his way to see Ida Jungmann about something. He held close to the wall, his eyes lowered, a book under his arm, intending to pass by his father with just a soft word of hello.

  But the senator spoke to him. “Well, Hanno, what are you up to?”

  “Working, Papa. I’m on my way to see Ida, to read my translation to her.”

  “And how’s it going? What’s the homework?”

  And as always, swallowing hard and with eyelashes lowered, Hanno replied quickly, obviously trying to give a correct, clear, and sharp-witted answer. “We have a translation of Cornelius Nepos, a bookkeeping entry to copy, French grammar, the rivers of North America, a German essay to correct.…”

  He fell silent, sorry that he hadn’t added a final “and” before letting his voice fall, since he didn’t know what else to say now. It made his whole answer seem abrupt and tentative. “Nothing else,” he said, as decisively as he could, but without looking up. His father, however, hadn’t seemed to notice; he was distracted somehow, not really paying attention to anything Hanno said. He just held the boy’s free hand in his, playing with it and letting his fingers run slowly along the delicate wrist.

  And then, quite suddenly, Hanno heard something being said above him that had no connection at all with their conversation—in a soft, anxious, and almost imploring voice that he had never heard before. But it was his father’s voice, and it said, “The lieutenant has been in there with Mama for two hours now, Hanno.”

  And at the sound of that voice, little Johann raised his golden-brown eyes and fixed them—larger, clearer, and more loving than ever before—on his father’s face, with its reddened eyelids beneath pale brows and its white, slightly puffy cheeks behind the long tips of the stiff mustache. God knows how much he understood. But one thing was certain, and they both felt it, that at that moment, as their eyes met and held, the estrangement and coldness, the constraint and misunderstanding between them fell away; and Thomas Buddenbrook knew that he could depend on his son’s trust and devotion whenever, as now, it was a matter of fear and suffering, and not, as usual, a matter of energy, competence, and bright-eyed vigor.

  But Thomas disregarded what had happened, worked hard to disregard it. And so, in the period that followed, he was stricter than ever about drilling Hanno in the practical things that would be important in his future life and work; he examined his intellectual abilities, pressed him for decisive statements about his love of the occupation awaiting him, and burst into rage at every sign of resistance and languor. The fact was that Thomas Buddenbrook, at forty-eight, had begun to count his days more and more, to reckon with the approach of death.

  His physical health had grown worse. He had little appetite and trouble sleeping; chills, which had always been a problem, now forced him to consult Dr. Langhals on several occasions. But he never managed to follow the doctor’s medical advice. His strength of will, shaky now after years of fussy, harassed inactivity, was no longer up to the task. He had begun to sleep very late of a morning, although each evening he would angrily resolve to rise early and take the walk before his morning tea that the doctor had suggested. But he actually followed through only two or three times—and it was much the same with everything else. All of this meant a constant strain on his will, and it brought him neither success nor a sense of satisfaction—only gnawed away at his self-respect and left him feeling desperate. He was not about to try to give up the narcotic pleasure of his pungent little Russian cigarettes—he had smoked them in great quantities since his youth. He told Dr. Langhals straight out, right to his conceited face, “You see, doctor, it is your duty to forbid me my cigarettes, a very easy and very pleasant duty indeed. But obeying that prohibition is up to me—you must realize that. No, we shall work together on my health, but the roles have been unevenly divided, and I end up with much the larger share of work to do. Don’t laugh—that’s not a joke. A man is so dreadfully alone. And so I smoke. May I offer you one?” And he held out his Russian nielloed case.

  All his energies were fading; the only thing that grew stronger was the conviction that all this could not last long and that his demise was near. The strangest premonitions would come to him. Several times at the dinner table, the sensation had come over him that he was not sitting there with his family, but had drifted off to some hazy distance and was looking back at them.

  I am going to die, he told himself, and one day he called Hanno in to him and said, “I can pass on sooner than we might think, my son. And then you must take my place. I was called to do just that early in life, too. What you must understand is that it’s your indifference that torments me. Have you firmly resolved the matter? … Yes—yes. That’s no answer. It’s always the same—no real answer. I ask whether you’ve resolved to do it, with courage and joy in your heart. Do you suppose you have enough money and won’t need to work? You’ll have nothing, you’ll be poor as a church mouse, you’ll have to make your own way, all by yourself. And if you want to live, to live well, you’ll have to work, to work long and hard, harder than I have.”

  But that was not all; what distressed him was no longer simply the worry about his son’s or his firm’s future. Something else, a new worry, descended on him,
took hold of him, and drove his weary thoughts before it. Because, as soon as he began to think of the end of life as something more than a distant, theoretical, and minor necessity and regarded it, instead, as imminent and tangible, as something for which one must make immediate preparations, he began to brood, to search himself, to examine how things stood between him and death and what he thought about matters beyond this earthly life. And at his very first attempt to do so, what he found was hopeless immaturity and a soul unprepared for death.

  Dogmatic faith in a fanatical biblical Christianity, which his father had been able to couple with a very practical eye for business and which his mother had then adopted later as well, had always been alien to him. All his life he had approached these first and last things with his grandfather’s worldly skepticism; but his needs were too profound and too metaphysical for him to find genuine satisfaction in old Johann Buddenbrook’s comfortable superficialities, and he had looked to history to answer the questions of eternity and immortality. He had told himself that he had lived in his ancestors and would continue to live in his descendants. The idea had fitted well with his sense of family, his patrician self-confidence, and his reverence for history; and it had also supported his ambitions and strengthened him as he went about the tasks of life. But now, as he gazed into the piercing eye of approaching death, it was apparent that such a view fell away to nothing, was incapable of providing him even an hour of calm or anything like readiness for death.

  Although Thomas Buddenbrook had toyed with Catholicism all his life, he was nevertheless imbued with a passionate Protestant’s sense of responsibility—earnest, profound, remorseless, to the point of self-flagellation. No, when it came to the ultimate and highest questions, there was no help from outside—no mediation, no absolution, no soothing consolation. Every man had to untangle the riddle on his own, had to work diligently at it, at hot speed, all by himself; before it was too late, he must either achieve some clear readiness for death, or die in despair. And Thomas Buddenbrook turned away in hopeless disappointment from his only son, in whom he had hoped to live on, strong and rejuvenated, and began in haste and fear to seek for truth—which had to exist somewhere for him.

  It was the middle of the summer of 1874. Silver-white, rounded clouds drifted in the deep blue sky above the delicate symmetry of the garden. In the branches of the walnut tree, birds were singing, their chirps ending in questions. The fountain splashed in the center of a wreath of tall, lavender-colored irises, and the scent of lilac was mixed, unfortunately, with a syrupy odor floating in on the warm breeze from a nearby sugar factory. To the amazement of his staff, the senator frequently left his office now in the middle of working hours and strolled about his garden, his hands behind his back; he would rake gravel, fish the algae from the fountain, or prune a rosebush. His face, with one pale eyebrow slightly lifted, was earnest and alert as he went about these tasks; but his thoughts were far away, following their own dark, arduous path.

  Sometimes he sat down up on the little terrace, inside the pavilion, under the shade of its covering grapevines, and, without seeing anything, he would look out across the garden to the red-brick rear wall of his house. The air was warm and sweet, and it seemed as if the peaceful sounds all around spoke gently to him, trying to lull him to sleep. And now and then, weary from staring at nothing, from loneliness and silence, he would close his eyes—only to pull himself up with a jerk and hastily banish such tranquillity. “I must think,” he said to himself, almost out loud, “I must put it all in order before it is too late.”

  But one day, in this same pavilion, he sat in his little yellow cane rocking chair, and with growing interest he read for four hours from a book that had come his way more or less by chance. Pausing in the smoking room for a cigarette after second breakfast, he had found it tucked in a corner of the bookshelf, behind a row of sturdy tomes, and recalled that he had bought it casually on sale at a bookshop years ago—a rather thick volume, poorly bound and badly printed on thin, yellowed paper, just the second half of a famous metaphysical system. He had taken it with him to the garden, and now, deeply engrossed, he turned page after page.

  He was filled with an unfamiliar sense of immense and grateful contentment. He felt the incomparable satisfaction of watching an enormously superior intellect grab hold of life, of cruel, mocking, powerful life, in order to subdue and condemn it. What he felt was the satisfaction of a sufferer who has always known only shame and the bite of conscience for hiding the suffering that cold, hard life brings, and who now, suddenly, from the hand of a great and wise man, receives elemental, formal justification for having felt such suffering in this world—in this best of all possible worlds, which by means of playful scorn was proved to be the worst of all possible worlds.

  He did not understand it all; some principles and premises remained unclear, and, not being a practiced reader of philosophy, he found he was unable to follow certain arguments. But it was precisely the alteration of light and darkness, of dull incomprehension, vague presentiments, and sudden enlightenment, that kept his breathless attention; and hours passed without his ever looking up from the book or even changing position in his chair.

  At first he had left many pages unread and swiftly plunged ahead, hurrying unconsciously to find the main point, searching for what was important to him, absorbing only a paragraph here or there that happened to engross him. But then he came across a long chapter that he read from the first word to the last, with his lips tightly closed, his eyebrows pursed, concentrating—his face registering a total, almost deathlike look of earnest concentration—oblivious to every trace of life stirring around him. This chapter was entitled: “Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature.”

  He had only a few more lines to read when, at four o’clock, the maid came across the garden and announced dinner. He nodded, read the remaining sentences, closed the book, and looked about him. He felt his whole being somehow immensely broadened and filled with heavy, dark intoxication. He was dazed, felt totally inebriated by something so indescribably new, alluring, and full of promise that it reminded him of the first time he had felt the hopes and yearnings of love. As he put the book away in the drawer of the garden table, his hands were cold and unsteady. His head felt hot, and a strange pressure, a disquieting tension had built up inside it, as if something were about to burst. He couldn’t complete a single thought.

  “What was that?” he asked himself as he went into the house and climbed the main staircase to join his family in the dining room. “What happened to me? What did I learn? What did it say to me—to me, Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook, dealers in wholesale grain? Was it written for me? Can I bear what it says? I don’t know what it was. I only know that it’s too much, too much for my poor average brain.”

  For the rest of the day, he felt overwhelmed by this heavy, dark, unthinking intoxication. And when evening came he found he could no longer keep his head from nodding and went to bed early. He slept for three hours—a deep, sleep, immeasurably deep, unlike any he had ever known. He awoke abruptly with a delicious start, like a man awakening alone in his bed with love stirring in his heart.

  He knew he was alone in the bedroom. Gerda slept in Ida Jungmann’s room now, because the old woman had moved to one of the three rooms on the third floor to be closer to Johann. Darkest night reigned—the curtains at the high windows had been pulled tight. He lay on his back in the deep silence of the slightly oppressive sultry night air, and stared up at the ceiling.

  But look—suddenly the darkness seemed to split open before his eyes, as if the velvet wall of night parted to reveal immeasurable deeps, an endless vista of light. “I’m going to live!” Thomas Buddenbrook said half aloud and felt his chest jolted by sobs somewhere deep inside. “That’s it—I’m going to live. It is going to live … and thinking that it and I are separate instead of one and the same—that is the illusion that death will set right. That’s it, th
at’s it! But why?” He asked the question—and night closed over him again. And he perceived, he knew, he understood not one whit of it now and let his head sink back into the pillow, blinded and exhausted by that smidgen of truth he had been permitted to see.

  And he lay there quietly in fervent expectation, was even tempted to pray for truth to return and illumine him again. And it did come. Not daring to stir, he lay there with his hands folded—and was allowed to watch.

  What was death? The answer to the question came to him now, but not in poor, pretentious words—instead, he felt it, possessed it somewhere within him. Death was a blessing, so great, so deep that we can fathom it only at those moments, like this one now, when we are reprieved from it. It was the return home from long, unspeakably painful wanderings, the correction of a great error, the loosening of tormenting chains, the removal of barriers—it set a horrible accident to rights again.

  An end, a dissolution? Empty words, and whoever was terrified by them was a pitiable wretch. What would end, what would dissolve? His body, his personality and individuality—this cumbersome, intractable, defective, and contemptible barrier to becoming something different and better.

  Was not every human being a mistake, a blunder? Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere! And, staring out hopelessly from between the bars of his individuality, a man sees only the surrounding walls of external circumstance, until death comes and calls him home to freedom.

  Individuality! Oh, what a man is, can, and has seems to him so poor, gray, inadequate, and boring. But what a man is not, cannot, and does not have—he gazes at all that with longing envy—envy that turns to love, because he fears it will turn to hate.